Thursday, January 13, 2011

Bloody Sunday

I am a coauthor of an updated version of the college American history textbook, currently titled "American Dreams & Reality: A Retelling of the American Story." Here I describe the violence attending a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabam in 1965.

Lyndon Johnson might have gotten his way regarding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic convention, but Martin Luther King would force the president’s hand regarding passage of a voting rights act in 1965. King had undergone a subtle transformation in his attitude toward non-violence. As historian Allen J. Matusow notes, “Once he employed it to persuade racial oppressors of their guilt and to change their hearts. Many broken heads later – in fact, by Birmingham, 1963 – he had come to direct his campaigns not at the heart of the South but at the conscience of the North, seeking primarily to enlist the coercive power of the federal government against racial injustice.” For his next voting rights campaign, King targeted Selma, Alabama, where only 383 of about 15,000 African Americans were registered. King chose Selma not only for the obvious suppression of black voting but because he could count on an overreaction by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark. This man had acquired a reputation for out-of-control anger and violence.

The campaign started in January 1965. King announced that the campaign would climax with a 54-mile march on March 7 from Selma to the statehouse in Montgomery, the one-time capital of the Confederacy. That day, 600 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge onto state Highway 80 before state troopers, who arrived in squad cars adorned with Confederate flags, halted the march. The state police charged into the crowd wielding billy clubs and firing tear gas canisters. State police chased the marchers back across the bridge with Sheriff Clark shouting, “Get those goddamned niggers.”

Deputies carried on what was essentially a police riot in Selma’s black neighborhoods that day, seizing a young black man from inside a church and throwing him through a stained-glass window decorated with an image of Jesus. Footage of the police violence interrupted ABC’s broadcast of the film Judgment at Nuremberg, and the ugly scenes played on televisions around the world. The event came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

King had been warned of an assassination plot by the Johnson administration and so was not present at the march but, after hearing of the injuries suffered by his friends and allies, he announced a second march. Johnson worked out a deal with Wallace, however. King could bring the marchers to the bridge, but they would halt when ordered to by the state troopers. The protestors would then bow in prayer and leave. Sadly, violence still broke out the night of the second march on March 9, when thugs beat to death James Reeb, a white minister from Massachusetts who had participated in earlier protests.

Matusow argues that this event marked a key turning point in the relationship between King and the younger firebrands in SNCC. SNCC activists already chafed because Selma represented one more case in which local groups laid the foundations for the movement before a national figure like King swooped down with the national media in tow to get credit and publicity. King’s compromises with state and national officials caused some members of SNCC to charge King with cowardice and betrayal of local activists.

King’s tactics, however, had an impact on President Johnson. Johnson had wanted a “cooling off” period for civil rights legislation and hoped to focus on Medicare and other parts of his “Great Society” agenda, but the scenes on Bloody Sunday outraged him, and he made a voting rights bill a priority. Johnson would also step in to allow King and his fellow marchers to complete their symbolic trek from Selma to Montgomery. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard for the third march, which began on March 21. With 1,900 guardsmen shielding them from violence, by the fourth day the marchers numbered 25,000 protestors and included entertainers like the musical group Peter, Paul and Mary, United Nations Ambassador Ralph Bunche, and longtime activists like Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Whitney Young. On March 25, King spoke from the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861.

The protestors happily sang freedom songs at the end of the long journey to Montgomery. This moment represented in many ways a final hurrah for King’s movement. A deep generational split over the tactics of non-violence and incremental reforms would cause the young members of SNCC to move in a more radical direction, to be followed by more confrontational groups such as the Black Panthers. Too many African Americans got tired of African American non-violence provoking white brutality. The night of March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, had volunteered to help transport marchers. The mother of five was driving with a black passenger on Highway 80, the main route to Montgomery, when a car occupied by four Klansman pulled alongside her and fatally shot her in the head. Gary Thomas Rowe, an informant on the FBI payroll, testified against the other three Klansmen, who were never convicted of the murder but sent to prison for 10 years for violation of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.

“The
Current is Stronger’: Images of Racial Oppression and Resistance in North Texas
Black Art During the 1920s and 1930s ” in Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D.
Wintz, eds., The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western
Experience (New York:
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011)

“Dallas,
1989-2011,” in Richardson Dilworth, ed. Cities in American Political History (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011)

(With
John Anthony Moretta and Keith J. Volanto), Keith J. Volonto and Michael
Phillips, eds., The American Challenge: A New History of the United States, Volume II. (Wheaton, Il.: Abigail Press,
2012).

“Texan by
Color: The Racialization of the Lone Star State,” in David Cullen and Kyle
Wilkison, eds., The Radical Origins of the Texas Right (College Station: University of Texas
Press, 2013).

He
is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history
of African American culture, politics and black intellectuals in the Lone Star
State called God Carved in Night: Black Intellectuals in Texas and the World
They Made.

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About Me

I received my Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. My first book, "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001," won the Texas State Historical Commission's T.R. Fehrenbach Award for best work on Texas history in 2007. My second book, "The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics" will be published by the University of Texas Press March 1, 2010.
My beautiful boy Dominic was born on May 30, 2003. He's an avid reader and loves Harry Potter and Star Wars.
I am a frustrated political liberal, holding Democrats in contempt but too suspicious about the competence of the Green Party to make the leap.
I am married to a wonderful woman named Betsy Friauf who was my editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram 20 years ago. We will be writing books together.
My only appointment television is "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report" and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." I also love to cook when I have the time.